Developing Countries and Refugees: a Normative Reflection

Is it possible to construct generous asylum policies that are not overwhelmed by applicants seeking to migrate for economic reasons? How should we conceive justice in the light of refugeehood? Governments of the world’s richest countries have recently expanded human and financial resources trying to figure out how to institutionally design a fair asylum response. A conflict here lies between the claims of refugees and the claims of citizens to limit access to the territory and resources of their community. All Western states have implemented over the last decades a remarkable array of restrictive measures (from external measures such as visa regimes, carrier sanctions and airport liaison officers to internal measures like detention, dispersal regimes and restrictions on access to welfare and housing) in order to protect the living standards of their nationals who benefit from welfare policies and long-lasting democratic regimes. I examine these issues from another geopolitical perspective. By dwelling on Brazil and South Africa I ask whether their internally significant social inequalities and their welfare under construction are sufficient reasons for restricting other’s entrance. Simultaneously, I test some normative arguments provided by legal and analytical philosophers who normally focus their attention on (1) who should be able to claim asylum and (2) which responsibilities states have in protecting those they recognize as refugees. In order to understand better their claims, it is worth considering how their responses are based on three related questions — namely, (i) Who is a refugee (and how his/her claim to enter differs from those of other immigrants)?; (ii) What is the source of our obligations to refugees?; (iii) What do we owe to refugees? In this case, I argue that reflection on justice is all too often shaped by an apolitical understanding. In other words, the way legal and philosophical analyses frame refugees’ issue uniquely through the lenses of distributive justice, whose criteria are based on quantities of goods, is at least disputable. Without grasping the political point of justice, one could not “do justice” to refugees’ issue either empirically or normatively. This is why such analysis of both developing countries is a sine qua non condition for better understanding how state responses to refugees rely on a number of domestic as well as external (political) factors (beyond legal constraints). The remaining question is then: Is it possible to translate such challenging situation into a just principle for both states and refugees? How justice is to be expressed in the light of it?